Syrian internet knocked out as protests fill the streets (video)

Syrian internet knocked out as protests fill the streets (video)

The Washington Post is reporting a massive internet outage across Syria today, a fact confirmed by government-backed outlet Syria-News.com. Internet traffic monitoring group Renesys began noting the outage at 7:00AM eastern time, with two-thirds of networks in the country affected -- half an hour later, 49 out of 50 networks in Syria were hit. The outage struck the nation as some 50,000 protesters took to the streets as part of a "Children's Friday" protest, drawing attention to the death of dozens of children in prior protests and calling for the resignation of the country's president, Bashar al-Assad. The timing has led many to speculate that the government itself is behind the shutdown, seemingly echoing recent outages in Egypt and Libya -- and Syria's long history of monitoring internet activity on sites like Facebook and YouTube certainly seems to lend credence to that claim. Video coverage of protests after the break.